VISIT REPORT
L.Burnard

UMRCC

January 22

Famulus
meeting

This meeting, convened by Richard Field under the
aegis and instructions of the IUSC , set out to review the status and
future prospects of Famulus as a package widely used for
bibliographical and quasi-bibliographical research. It was quite
well-attended, sites represented being ULCC , Aberdeen, York, Warwick,
Atlas, Edinburgh (PLU), UMRCC Southampton, UCL and Trent
Poly. Versions of Famulus were now available on CDC 6600/7600, Dec 1O
and 20, IBM361/370, Honeywell, GEC 4020, Burroughs B6700, ICL 2900
& 1900 at least, each version having slightly different parentage
and features. The Ur-Famulus, which was developed for the US
Department of Forestry in Los Angeles some years ago, had been updated
somewhat since its invasion of Europe (and New Zealand, which is where
the Burroughs version came from); Aberdeen had been in touch with its
originators but the changes appeared to be purely cosmetic and they
did not seem willing to make them generally
available.

Discussion centred initially on what role Famulus
played in the spectrum of text processing packages. It was necessary
to distinguish it clearly from full text searching packages like
Status, Quill, Sift, 3ip etc. Such packages were currently under
consideration by SPC anyway. Famulus had an unusually clear user
interface which was widely admired and liked; moreover the Ossify
program meant that an equally clear 'system interface' format was
available for transferring between versions. Nearly all sites reported
that the package was used chiefly for maintaining bibliographies or
similar catalogues; most sites reported about a dozen to twenty
users. The largest applications mentioned were the Manchester Museum's
catalogue and the Oxford Onomasticon project. It was suggested that
the function of KWIC/INDEX was better performed by a full text
searching system or by OCP .

Amongst enhancements proposed
were:- full character-handling facilities analagous to those of OCP;
ability to define some fields as being numeric and ability to do some
simple arithmetic on them (sums, averages, distributions, comparison
etc); ability to define date fields; data validation, perhaps by a
stand-alone input utility; extending the formatting options of Galley,
particularly to include hierarchically sorted data and tabular output;
There was general agreement that the present internal format was
wasteful of space and could profitably be reorganised e.g. to use
variable length records, or even ISAM files where these were
available.

The meeting discussed briefly the problems of getting
funding for a complete rewrite of the system, or the possibility of
evaluating all the currently available software against
Famulus-requirements. It was concluded that a working party should be
set up to draw up a detailed report of what facilities currently
existed in all the known versions of the package, and what
enhancements were generally needed. An interface to support these
requirements would be defined, in terms of the existing Famulus
command language, and those sites which wanted to implement any of the
proposed goodies would do so. R.Field would report back to IUSC which
would then set up a working party and co-opt members onto
it.